White Trash
Page 1
BY NANCY ISENBERG
Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr
Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America
BY NANCY ISENBERG WITH ANDREW BURSTEIN
Madison and Jefferson
VIKING
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
penguin.com
Copyright © 2016 by Nancy Isenberg
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
ISBN 9780670785971
Ebook ISBN 9781101608487
Version_1
In memory of Gerda Lerner and Paul Boyer
CONTENTS
BY NANCY ISENBERG
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
Fables We Forget By
Part I: To Begin the World Anew
CHAPTER ONE
Taking Out the Trash: Waste People in the New World
CHAPTER TWO
John Locke’s Lubberland: The Settlements of Carolina and Georgia
CHAPTER THREE
Benjamin Franklin’s American Breed: The Demographics of Mediocrity
CHAPTER FOUR
Thomas Jefferson’s Rubbish: A Curious Topography of Class
CHAPTER FIVE
Andrew Jackson’s Cracker Country: The Squatter as Common Man
Part II: Degeneration of the American Breed
CHAPTER SIX
Pedigree and Poor White Trash: Bad Blood, Half-Breeds, and Clay-Eaters
CHAPTER SEVEN
Cowards, Poltroons, and Mudsills: Civil War as Class Warfare
CHAPTER EIGHT
Thoroughbreds and Scalawags: Bloodlines and Bastard Stock in the Age of Eugenics
CHAPTER NINE
Forgotten Men and Poor Folk: Downward Mobility and the Great Depression
CHAPTER TEN
The Cult of the Country Boy: Elvis Presley, Andy Griffith, and LBJ’s Great Society
Part III: The White Trash Makeover
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Redneck Roots: Deliverance, Billy Beer, and Tammy Faye
CHAPTER TWELVE
Outing Rednecks: Slumming, Slick Willie, and Sarah Palin
EPILOGUE
America’s Strange Breed: The Long Legacy of White Trash
NOTES
INDEX
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Image 1 The Mapp of Lubberland or the Ile of Lazye (ca. 1670), British Print, #1953.0411.69AN48846001, The British Museum, London, England
Image 2 Encounter Between a Corncracker and an Eelskin, from Davy Crockett’s Almanack of 1837, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts
Image 3 “Old Sug,” from John Robb’s Streaks of Squatter Life (1847), American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts
Image 4 “The Bad Bird and the Mudsill,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, February 21, 1863
Image 5 Chart used at a fair in Kansas promoting fitter families and eugenic marriages (ca. 1929), Scrapbook, American Eugenic Society Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Image 6 The 10,000 Hookworm Family, 201 H Alabama, Hookworm, Box 42, Folder 1044, #1107, 1913, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York
Image 7 Photograph of Henry McLean, age twenty-three, infected with hookworm, and W. C. Riddich, age twenty-one, not infected, 236 H North Carolina, Box 53, Folder 1269, #236 Vashti Alexander County, North Carolina, May 29, 1913, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York
Image 8 Carrie Buck and her mother, Emma (1924), Arthur Estabrook Collection, M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, University of Albany Libraries, Albany, New York
Image 9 Eroded land on tenant’s farm, Walker County, Alabama (Arthur Rothstein, 1937), LC-USF34-025121, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC
Image 10 Homestead, Penderlea, North Carolina (1936), LC-USF33-000717-M2, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC
Image 11 The Beverly Hillbillies as American Gothic on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, February 2, 1963
Image 12 Trailer trash as squatters in Winkelman, Arizona (1950), Photograph Collection of the History and Archives Division of the Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records, Phoenix, Arizona
Image 13 Will Counts’s photograph of Elizabeth Ann Eckford and Hazel Bryan in Little Rock, Arkansas, September 4, 1957, Will Counts Collection, Indiana University Archives
Image 14 Taylor Thornberry, Life magazine, September 23, 1957, Francis Miller/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
Image 15 LBJ visiting Appalachian families for the Tour on Poverty (1963), #215-23-64, Inez Kentucky, LBJ Library Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Austin, Texas
Image 16 Dolly Parton stand-up poster from Nashville, Tennessee, featured in Roy Blount Jr., “Country’s Angels,” Esquire, March 1977
Image 17 Tammy Faye Bakker on the cover of her album Don’t Give Up (1985)
Image 18 Bill Maxwell’s article “Seen as ‘White Trash’: Maybe Some Hate Clinton Because He’s Too Southern,” Wilmington, North Carolina, Star-News, June 19, 1994
Image 19 Caricature of Sarah Palin in overalls by Steve Brodner in The New Yorker, December 7, 2009
Image 20 Ritz Brothers from the Hollywood movie Kentucky Moonshine (1938) and the cast of A&E’s reality TV show Duck Dynasty (2015)
PREFACE
One of the most memorable films of all time is To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), a classic portrait of the legacy of slavery and racial segregation in the South. It is a film that I have been teaching for over two decades, and is one of President Obama’s favorite movies. Yet when my students watch this film (even if they were exposed to it in high school), they see for the first time that the drama within has not one but two disturbing messages.
One plotline is about the brave, principled lawyer Atticus Finch, who refuses to perpetuate the racial double standard: despite opposition, he agrees to defend an Afro-American, Tom Robinson, on the charge of raping a poor white girl, Mayella Ewell. Though the court finds Robinson guilty, we the viewers know he is innocent. An honorable, hardworking family man, he stands well above the degraded Ewells, his accusers. The shabbily attired Mayella is cowed by her bully of a father, a scrawny man seen in overalls, who is devoid of merit or morality. Bob Ewell demands that the all-white jury of common men take his side, which they do in the end. He insists that they help him avenge his daughter’s honor. Not satisfied when Robinson is killed trying to escape from prison, he attacks Atticus Finch’s two children on Halloween night.
Bob Ewell’s full name is Robert E. Lee Ewell. But he is not an heir of one of the aristocratic families of the Old South. As Harper Lee described them in the novel from which the classic film was adapted, the Ewells were members of the terminally poor, those whose status could not be lifted or debased by any economic fluctuation—not even the Depression. They were human waste. In the author’s words, “No truant officers could keep their numerous offspring in school; no public health officer could free them
from congenital defects, various worms, and diseases indigenous to filthy surroundings.” They lived behind the town dump, which they combed every day. Their run-down shack was “once a Negro cabin.” Garbage was strewn everywhere, making the cabin look like the “playhouse of an insane child.” No one in the neighborhood knew how many children lived there: some thought nine, others six. To the town of Maycomb, Alabama, the Ewell children were simply “dirty-faced ones at the windows when anyone passed.”1 The Ewells are unmistakably what southerners (and a lot of other people) called white trash.
Americans today have a narrow and skewed understanding of white trash. One of the most powerful and most familiar symbols of backward attitudes associated with this unfavored group is that captured in newspapers and in television footage of 1957, showing the angry white faces of protest amid school integration in Little Rock, Arkansas. In 2015, tattooed KKK protestors defending the Confederate flag outside the Charleston, South Carolina, statehouse evoked similar feelings, demonstrating the persistence of an embarrassing social phenomenon. The stock of the Food Network’s popular performer Paula Deen, a Georgia native known for her cholesterol-rich recipes, suddenly took a nosedive in 2013, when it was revealed that she used the “N word”; almost overnight, her down-home reputation sank and she was rebranded as a crude, unsophisticated redneck. At the other extreme, television viewers have been treated to such repackaged vaudeville characters as Jefferson Davis “Boss” Hogg in The Dukes of Hazzard (1979–85), which could be seen in reruns until 2015, when it was dropped because of the Confederate flag painted on Bo and Luke Duke’s car, “General Lee.” The very title of this show was a pun on class identity, since the Dukes are poor Georgia mountain folk and moonshiners, yet their name implies English royalty.2
These white trash snapshots offer an incomplete picture of a problem that is actually quite old and regularly goes unrecognized. In their conversations about viral events such as those noted above, Americans lack any deeper appreciation of class. Beyond white anger and ignorance is a far more complicated history of class identity that dates back to America’s colonial period and British notions of poverty. In many ways, our class system has hinged on the evolving political rationales used to dismiss or demonize (or occasionally reclaim) those white rural outcasts seemingly incapable of becoming part of the mainstream society.
The Ewells, then, are not bit players in our country’s history. Their history starts in the 1500s, not the 1900s. It derives from British colonial policies dedicated to resettling the poor, decisions that conditioned American notions of class and left a permanent imprint. First known as “waste people,” and later “white trash,” marginalized Americans were stigmatized for their inability to be productive, to own property, or to produce healthy and upwardly mobile children—the sense of uplift on which the American dream is predicated. The American solution to poverty and social backwardness was not what we might expect. Well into the twentieth century, expulsion and even sterilization sounded rational to those who wished to reduce the burden of “loser” people on the larger economy.
In Americans’ evolving attitudes toward these unwanted people, perhaps the most dramatic language attached to the mid-nineteenth century, when poor rural whites were categorized as somehow less than white, their yellowish skin and diseased and decrepit children marking them as a strange breed apart. The words “waste” and “trash” are crucial to any understanding of this powerful and enduring vocabulary. Throughout its history, the United States has always had a class system. It is not only directed by the top 1 percent and supported by a contented middle class. We can no longer ignore the stagnant, expendable bottom layers of society in explaining the national identity.
The poor, the waste, the rubbish, as they are variously labeled, have stood front and center during America’s most formative political contests. During colonial settlement, they were useful pawns as well as rebellious troublemakers, a pattern that persisted amid mass migrations of landless squatters westward across the continent. Southern poor whites figured prominently in the rise of Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party, and in the atmosphere of distrust that caused bad blood to percolate among the poorer classes within the Confederacy during the Civil War. White trash were dangerous outliers in efforts to rebuild the Union during Reconstruction; and in the first two decades of the twentieth century, when the eugenics movement flourished, they were the class of degenerates targeted for sterilization. On the flip side, poor whites were the beneficiaries of rehabilitative efforts during the New Deal and in LBJ’s “Great Society.”
At all times, white trash remind us of one of the American nation’s uncomfortable truths: the poor are always with us. A preoccupation with penalizing poor whites reveals an uneasy tension between what Americans are taught to think the country promises—the dream of upward mobility—and the less appealing truth that class barriers almost invariably make that dream unobtainable. Of course, the intersection of race and class remains an undeniable part of the overall story.
The study presented here reveals a complicated legacy. It’s not just a question of labeling the bottom at any given time. Rationalizing economic inequality has been an unconscious part of the national credo; poverty has been naturalized, often seen as something beyond human control. By this measure, poor whites had to be classified as a distinct breed. In other words, breeding was not about the cultivation of social manners or skills, but something far more sinister: an imposed inheritance. The language of class that America embraced played off English attitudes toward vagrancy, and marked a transatlantic fixation with animal husbandry, demography, and pedigree. The poor were not only described as waste, but as inferior animal stocks too.
Over the years, populist themes have emerged alongside more familiar derogatory images, but never with enough force to diminish the hostility projected onto impoverished rural whites. We have seen in recent decades the rise of tribal passions through the rediscovery of “redneck roots,” a proud movement that coursed through the 1980s and 1990s. More than a reaction to progressive changes in race relations, this shift was spurred on by a larger fascination with identity politics. Roots implied that class took on the traits (and allure) of an ethnic heritage, which in turn reflected the modern desire to measure class as merely a cultural phenomenon. But as evidenced in the popularity of the “reality TV” shows Duck Dynasty and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo in recent years, white trash in the twenty-first century remains fraught with the older baggage of stereotypes of the hopelessly ill bred.
A host of well-known and lesser-known figures contributed to the long saga of America’s embattled lowly breed. These include Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Davy Crockett, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Jefferson Davis, Andrew Johnson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Theodore Roosevelt, Erskine Caldwell, James Agee, Elvis Presley, Lyndon Baines Johnson, James Dickey, Billy Carter, Dolly Parton, William Jefferson Clinton, and Sarah Palin, to name a few. Examining their ideas, shifting public images, and self-images helps us to make greater sense of the curious and complicated story of American class identity.
This book tells many stories, then. One is the importance of America’s rural past. Another, and arguably the most important, is the one we as a people have trouble embracing: the pervasiveness of a class hierarchy in the United States. It begins and ends with the concepts of land and property ownership: class identity and the material and metaphoric meaning of land are closely connected. For much of American history, the worst classes were seen as extrusions of the worst land: scrubby, barren, and swampy wasteland. Home ownership remains today the measure of social mobility.
My interest in this topic goes back to graduate school, where I was fortunate to have worked with two remarkable scholars whose approach to history shaped my professional career in significant ways. Gerda Lerner, my doctoral dissertation adviser, had a keen passion for demystifying ideologies, and she instilled in me a wariness for the limits of conventional wisdom. Paul Boyer was an intellectual
historian with an amazing range, who wrote with subtlety and grace about Puritan New England, nineteenth-century moral reformers, and twentieth-century religious fundamentalists. The border town of San Benito, Texas, figures into my interest in this topic as well. It was my mother’s birthplace. Her father, John MacDougall, was a modern-day colonist, bringing settlers from Canada to farm the land.
Friends and colleagues have helped this book along in crucial ways. I wish to thank those who read chapters, gave suggestions, or sent along sources: Chris Tomlins, Alexis McCrossen, Liz Varon, Matt Dennis, Lizzie Reis, Amy Greenberg, and my LSU colleague Aaron Sheehan-Dean. Lisa Francavilla managing editor of The Papers of Jefferson: Retirement Series, Charlottesville, Virginia, called my attention to a valuable letter; Charles Roberts graciously shared with me a crucial newspaper article on the resettlement community of Palmerdale, Alabama. My Viking editor, Wendy Wolf, with roots in New Orleans, was instrumental in tightening the argument and policing the prose. Wendy put an extraordinary amount of time, skill, and care into the manuscript; her thoughtful editing has taken a complex history and made it far more reader friendly, proving that academic rigor does not have to limit accessibility. Most of all, I have to thank Andy Burstein, my dearest confidant and fellow historian, whose critical eye made this a much better book.
INTRODUCTION
Fables We Forget By
We know what class is. Or think we do: economic stratification created by wealth and privilege. The problem is that popular American history is most commonly told—dramatized—without much reference to the existence of social classes. It is as though in separating from Great Britain, the United States somehow magically escaped the bonds of class and derived a higher consciousness of enriched possibility. After all, the U.S. Senate is not the House of Lords. Schoolbooks teach the national narrative along the lines of “how land and liberty were won” or “how ordinary folks seized opportunity.” The hallowed American dream is the gold standard by which politicians and voters alike are meant to measure quality of life as each generation pursues its own definition of happiness unfettered by the restraints of birth (who your parents are) or station (the position you start out from in the class system).